Reefkeeping and earthquakes

[taote]

Hi everybody. I live in a 15th floor apartment in Santiago, Chile. As you may know, we were hit by a big earthquake two weeks ago. 8.8 Richter scale. To honor Murphy's law, me and my wife were 500 Km away from home, in a place very near to the epicenter, and the roads were damaged, so we had to stay for five days out. Electricity took 5 days to return. My son managed to get to the apartment on the third day. There was a lot of damage to the things inside the apt. but no structural problems. Construction in my country is very good, and for a good reason. I have a 120 gal. custom made reef tank with a big, below tank sump. The stand was made on request, combining a steel frame with heavy wood. A double metal halide fixture hangs over it. Everything resisted finely the force of this mega earthquake. Some water splashed from the sump after the electricity went down and water flowed from the tank. BUT...everything inside was dead because of the power failure. I had no automatic back up for such cases. I always thought that at such an event I was going to be near, and I had a couple of Tunze pumps installed that would work, tweaking a little, with a car battery.
I would like to hear from some similar experiences from earthquake countries, and learn about their experiences in trying to solve the problems associated with them. What would be the best way of preventing this accident in the future? As you can see, I am not leaving the hobby, but I want to start again better prepared. My tank is running again, but with the bare rock, devoid of any corals or fish. I will wait several months before assembling it again, because we still have daily small "replicas", 5 to 6 Richter. Even a small 6.9 small one the other day.

[PaxRoma]

sorry for the loss. Must have been really hard on you.

[planejane]

Sorry for the losses, but thankful you and the family are fine.

[dj9264]

Sorry to hear about your tank. No where on earth has there been quakes like Chile has had. Glad you and your family are unharmed and your country seems to have done by news accounts fairly well.

We also have earthquakes in California. In 1989, I was in Berkeley (which is across a bay from San Francisco) and what we consider a major quake 6.8 hit but power was only out for a short time. So, it is interesting that 6.9 is small.

To compare in 1906, a major earthquake (8.2) struck two miles off San Francisco and the whole city burnt down, Besides Alaska, this is the biggest the US has ever had.

But we all have power outages (blackouts.) We have brownouts where the energy companies cut the power just because we are using too much. I use Tunzes on a battery backup.

Thankfully, now I'm a ways off what called the San Andreas Fault which runs right up through our state.

[taote]

Dana:

How much time you get from your Tunzes and with how big a battery?